Orphaned bats fly free after months of foster care in Brisbane

Scores of young fruit bats in Brisbane's west are taking to the skies for the first time after months of devoted care from a team of foster parents.

Volunteers have taken it upon themselves to spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars nursing around 450 sick and injured bats to health over the past few months.

More than 200 of the young animals were orphaned during the January heatwave in south-east Queensland, doubling the number of orphans normally rescued over a summer.

Connie Kerr has turned her property in Camira into a virtual child-care centre for bats, with walk-in cages sheltering dozens of animals at a time until they are strong enough to fly free.

When the ABC visited, the outdoor laundry area resembled a small-scale fruit processing centre, as four volunteers sheltered from pouring rain and chopped up 100 kilograms of fruit to feed the bats.

"They're making it into a bit of a fruit salad and we add a specially formulated high-protein supplement onto that," Bat Conservation and Rescue Queensland volunteer Ms Kerr said.

"A lot of these young bats in the wild would still be suckling on their mothers to a degree, so they would be getting some protein and calcium from their mum's milk.

"We've got to provide something to replicate that and we've got them at an age where we can't do them on the bottle-raising anymore ... so we've got this supplement that goes on the fruit."

Labour of love

As Armando Invelito operated the lever on a fruit-crushing machine, he dismissed a suggestion that he deserved any credit for volunteering two afternoons a week to the bats.

"It's a few hours here and there and it's not hard work," he said as he tipped a bucket of chopped fruit into a bowl for weighing.

"Anyone else would do the same, it's worth it to help the little fellas get healthy again."

His wife Christen was at the other end of the work bench, sliding chunks of banana and apple onto skewers to make fruit 'kebabs' for the hungry animals.

The volunteers said the afternoon's total of around 100 kilograms of fruit was typical. Tonnes of fruit have passed through the operation over the past few months.

It takes months of bottle feeding with infant formula by individual carers before the bats graduate to Ms Kerr's cages.

Individual animals have been tracked from places like Rockhampton to Melbourne. This is the starting point for the little guys.

Connie Kerr

There are two cages; the younger bats build their strength and learn to fly in the first, and then graduate to the second cage when they are getting close to being released into the wild.

From there they are integrated into a thousands-strong colony above a creek next to the property.

The colony at Camira provides an initial base for the novice bats, but they will end up travelling from colony to colony around south-east Queensland and up and down the east coast of Australia.

"We've had a lot radio-collar tracked and they all follow the flowering and the food sources," Ms Kerr said.

"Individual animals have been tracked from places like Rockhampton to Melbourne, so it's wherever there's food. This is the starting point for the little guys."

Neighbours happy to live with bats

Despite the numbers in the colony sometimes swelling to around 7,000, Ms Kerr says local residents have no problems sharing the neighbourhood with the bats.

She says January's heatwave, and the associated publicity when hundreds of bats were orphaned, helped garner some sympathy for the much-maligned creatures.

"Temperatures climbed to over 45 degrees throughout a lot of the western suburbs of Brisbane and the black flying foxes start dropping dead at 42.7 degrees, grey-headed flying foxes at 43.7," she said.

"A lot of the adults succumbed but the young babies that were still on mums got a lot of the hydration and managed to stay a bit cooler.

"A lot of the babies were still clinging to their dead mums in piles of dead bodies, which was pretty horrible.

"The neighbours were aware we were here, but they became more aware and very helpful and we had some amazing support."

The support includes substantial discounts and donations of fruit from local shops and supermarkets.

"The local Woolworths have three days a week where we pick up damaged unsaleable stock from them and a lot of places now do this to help charities around the place," Ms Kerr said.

"Other than that it comes out of our pocket as far as paying for it. We're very lucky to get some good pricing."